After crossing paths with the Beats in New York City in 1946, Neal Cassady inspired some of their most famous works, including Jack Kerouac's "On The Road."
Neal Cassady EstateNeal Cassady as a young man.
Neal Cassady never published a book in his life. Yet he’s considered one of the most prominent figures of the Beat Generation — and a crucial influence on the work of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
A drifter and a voracious reader who lived life at one speed — fast — Cassady became a crucial part of the Beat Generation. After passing through New York City in the 1940s, he inspired the character of Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On The Road and was called the “secret hero” of Ginsberg’s Howl.
Still, Neal Cassady’s story remains largely unknown. Overshadowed by the literary careers of Kerouac and Ginsberg, Cassady remains an enigmatic.
This is the story of Neal Cassady, from his influence on the Beats, to his own literary ambitions, to his tragic death at the age of just 41.
An Early Life Spent On The Move
Born on Feb. 8, 1926, in Salt Lake City, Utah, Neal Cassady had a tumultuous life from the start. According to Neal Cassady: The Fast Life Of A Beat Hero by David Sandison and Graham Vickers, Cassady was not literally born in a car, as he later told Kerouac, but he was born to a family on the move.
Cassady’s family — his parents and seven half-siblings — were en route from Iowa to California at the time. They made a pit stop in Salt Lake City, where Cassady was born at Salt Lake County General hospital.
From that point on, Neal Cassady never really settled down. His mother died when he was 10, and Cassady had a transient childhood with his alcoholic father in Colorado. Though bright, athletic, and motivated to do well in school, according to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Cassady also drifted toward a life of petty crime.
Public DomainNeal Cassady in a 1944 Denver mugshot.
At 15, Cassady ran away from home for the first time. He began to work as a sex worker, and got in trouble with the law for a string of incidents involving car theft. By the time he was 21, Cassady had been arrested six times.
But everything changed when one of Cassady’s clients introduced him to a young man named Hal Chase. A student at Columbia College, Chase’s friends included Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. And when Neal Cassady traveled to New York City in 1946 with his 16-year-old bride, LuAnn Henderson, Chase fatefully introduced them to Cassady.
Neal Cassady’s Relationship With Jack Kerouac And Allen Ginsberg
Wikimedia CommonsNeal Cassady and Jack Kerouac were friends as young men.
Though Neal Cassady was in New York City for just a few months before returning to Denver, he left a lasting impression on the people he met — especially two of them, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
Kerouac and Cassady struck up a deep and passionate friendship; Ginsberg and Cassady became lovers. According to the Beat Museum, love poems that Ginsberg wrote in 1947 — “The Proposal” and “Love Letter: Easter Sunday 1947” — were “all but certainly” written for Neal Cassady. And Kerouac was so enchanted by his encounter with Cassady that he soon drove out to Denver to see him. This would be the start of several road trips that Kerouac and Cassady took together, some of which lasted months.
Neal Cassady inspired Jack Kerouac in other, profound ways as well. In December 1950, he wrote Kerouac an 18-page letter which recounted his wild love affair with a woman named “Joan.”
“I called my love aside and out of the blue told her I’d been thinking it over and maybe it would be better if she went to Fort Collins alone when the rent came due tomorrow,” reads one part of the letter. “Straight off her complection changed, pale lips quivered, then grimaced as tears sprung. From out incredulous eyes came stricken disbelief.”
Kerouac found Cassady’s rambling, stream-of-consciousness style absolutely brilliant.
Emory UniversityPages from the “Joan Anderson Letter,” which Neal Cassady wrote to Jack Kerouac in December 1950.
“It was the greatest piece of writing I ever saw,” Kerouac later said, “better’n anybody in America, or at least enough to make [Herman] Melville, [Mark] Twain, [Theodore] Dreiser, [Thomas] Wolfe, I dunno who, spin in their graves.”
According to the Beat Museum, the letter very likely inspired Kerouac’s own famous “spontaneous prose” style of writing. And when Kerouac penned his famous work, On The Road, he based the character of Dean Moriarty on Neal Cassady, and the many road trips they took together.
Meanwhile, Cassady inspired Ginsberg in many ways as well.
Allen Ginsberg ArchivesAllen Ginsberg in the 1950s, after he had met and fallen in love with Neal Cassady.
Ginsberg would write several poems about Neal Cassady. Most famously, Ginsberg included Cassady in his famous long poem Howl in which Ginsberg calls Cassady “N.C., secret hero of these poems.”
But while Ginsberg loved Neal Cassady, and Kerouac was fascinated by him, Cassady himself never stayed with anyone person — or in any one place — for very long. He was married twice, including overlapping bigamous marriages, and had frequent love affairs.
Indeed, Neal Cassady spent his final days on the road until his death in Mexico in 1968, at the age of just 41.
The Wild, Final Days Of Neal Cassady
In the 1950s, Neal Cassady behaved erratically, ran out on his second wife Carolyn and their children, and spent two years in San Quentin after being arrested on a drug charge. In the 1960s, he met Ken Kesey — the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — and joined his Merry Pranksters, artists and writers who traveled the country in a bus called “Further.” The group sought to create art and to experience life on the road while high on LSD.
Magnolia PicturesNeal Cassady and Timothy Leary — an advocate for psychedelic drugs — on the bus, in a photo taken by Allen Ginsberg.
The adventures of the Merry Pranksters were documented by Tom Wolfe, who wrote about their psychedelic journey in his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
But while Neal Cassady may have looked like the life of the party from the outside, the truth was perhaps quite different. His ex-wife Carolyn — who divorced him in 1963, and asked him to stop visiting her and their children in 1965 — believes that Cassady was on a path of a self destruction.
“They treated him like a trained bear,” she told The Guardian of the Merry Pranksters in 2011. “Neal said he took any drug, any pill, anyone handed him. He didn’t care. He was doing his damnedest to get killed… He realized he would never become respectable, as he wanted, and he wanted to die.”
And in February 1968, just days before his 42nd birthday, Neal Cassady’s wild life caught up with him. While attending a party in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, on Feb. 3, he consumed barbiturates and alcohol, and then wandered out into the night wearing just jeans and a t-shirt.
Cassady was discovered in a coma by the railroad tracks the next morning. He was taken to the hospital, where he died a few hours later.
The Allen Ginsberg ProjectNeal Cassady ultimately died at the age of just 41.
Though unpublished during his life, Cassady was a writer and was close to finishing a novel at the time he died. It was published posthumously, alongside some of his correspondences, as The First Third. But ultimately, Neal Cassady was best known for his influence on the Beats and others.
Cassady made his way into the works of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Ken Kesey and more. Even after death, Ginsberg eulogized him in a number of poems, including “On Neal Cassidy’s Ashes.”
“Delicate eyes that blinded the blue Rockies,” Ginsberg writes sadly in the poem of his lost friend, his lost love, “all ash.”
After reading about how Neal Cassady’s wild life inspired some of the most famous Beat books and poems, learn about Sally Horner, who inspired ‘Lolita.’ Then, discover the story of Roland Doe, who inspired ‘The Exorcist.’
